The Collection That Grew Past Memory
A Seiko SKX007, a Hamilton Khaki Field Mechanical, an Orient Mako, a Citizen Promaster Diver — four pieces and you can carry the essential specs of each in your head. At twelve pieces, the edge cases start to blur. At twenty, you will misremember which of your two Vostok Amphibias has the 200m rating and which has the 100m, because the cases look nearly identical and the bezels are both black. At forty pieces, you have a collection that warrants a database regardless of how good your memory is.
The watch collector's specific problem is that watches carry meaningful technical information that matters in completely different contexts: water resistance when you are packing for a dive trip, case size when you are dressing for a formal event, movement type when you are planning a service schedule, luminosity when you need a readable dial in low light.
Three Boolean Fields That Do Heavy Lifting
Automatic, Chronograph, and — implicitly — movement type as a text field form the core mechanical classification layer. These seem like simple fields until you consider what they actually resolve.
Automatic separates pieces that need winding attention or winder storage from quartz pieces that simply need battery monitoring. A collection that has both automatic and quartz pieces across the same drawer needs to know, at a glance, which pieces are currently running, which may have stopped from inactivity, and which pieces will read accurate time without any intervention when pulled from storage.
Chronograph is the complication that most affects how a watch is used rather than stored. A non-chronograph dive watch is your daily driver in the water. A chronograph with 300m water resistance is theoretically water resistant but the pusher seals on most chronographs are not rated for that kind of use — so knowing immediately which pieces have the chronograph pushers matters when you are deciding what to take on a dive trip. The Chronograph boolean lets you filter that in seconds.
Movement as a free-text field handles everything from "Seiko NH35A" to "ETA 2824-2" to "in-house caliber" to "Miyota 9015" without forcing a choice that would become outdated as movements evolve. Combined with the Automatic boolean, it provides enough technical specificity to schedule service correctly: an ETA 2824-2 has a recommended service interval of five to seven years; a Seiko NH35A is generally considered maintenance-free by comparison. Those differences matter for service cost planning across a collection.
Case Size and Water Resistance as Deployment Filters
Case size in millimeters as an integer field enables a filter that most collectors use implicitly but rarely record explicitly. Pieces under 38mm read differently under a dress shirt cuff than pieces over 42mm. A collection that spans from 36mm dress watches to 47mm pilot watches needs to know the case diameter without picking up every piece.
Water resistance in meters — stored as an integer — resolves the most misunderstood spec in watch collecting. 30m is splash resistant. 100m is suitable for swimming. 200m is rated for recreational diving. 300m and above is for serious diving work. The difference between 100m and 200m is not intuitive from the numbers, but it is critical for use. Filtering for 200m-and-above pieces gives you your dive candidates without reading through every record.
Complications as a Free-Text Record
The Complications field as free text is where the record captures everything that does not fit the boolean structure. Date, day-date, GMT, world time, power reserve indicator, moon phase, annual calendar, perpetual calendar — a collection of any diversity will have complications that no fixed choice list could anticipate cleanly. Writing "date at 3, GMT, power reserve indicator" in a free-text field is faster and more precise than navigating a checkbox matrix that was built before you owned a piece with a specific complication combination.
Luminosity type captures a detail that matters both for use and for collector interest. Lume quality — BGW9, C3, C5, LumiNova grades, SuperLumiNova — varies significantly across price points and eras. Watches with tritium plots versus modern lume tubes have different aging characteristics and different values to collectors who specifically seek one or the other. A 1970s Omega with original tritium dials that glow appropriately faint is not a defect; it is a provenance marker. Having the luminosity type in a searchable field means you can find your vintage tritium pieces without relying on memory of which era each piece came from.
Value in CAD marks the current market price, which for watches changes meaningfully over time. A Rolex Submariner ref. 5513 bought decades ago for a few hundred dollars holds a current value measured in five figures. Having a Value field that you update periodically — based on Chrono24, Bob's Watches, or auction results — keeps your insurance figure current without pulling out every piece for reappraisal.